When the Forest Goes Quiet: What Are We Losing in Northern Ontario?

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Hello everyone and welcome to Love the North and today we're going to be talking a little bit more about Lysophate and the spraying that happens in this time of year, especially in Northern Ontario when it comes to forestry. For all my friends out there, we're going to ask you to subscribe to the platform and what that actually does is it helps us to bring more content which is specifically Northern Ontario related. Today we're going to be talking about Troy Woodhouse. He's up in the Timmins area and he's part of the flying post first.

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What is, what's he seeing with the spray and what's happening, you know, maybe changes to the land throughout his time. So Troy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, introduce yourself a little bit and tell us about, you know, your surroundings. Yeah, so my name is Troy Woodhouse. I'm a descendant of the Cookatish Indian Band. Today recognized as flying post 73 along the Groundhog River in Treaty 9. It's just west of Timmins about 40 kilometres. I work in lands and resources for the Michigagawa Council. It's a First Nation Tribal Council that supports communities in the James Bay and Timmins area. I grew up in Foley at Ontario, a small town, a lot of forestry as the main industry. I grew up hunting, fishing. My grandparents ran a hunting and fishing lodge on Groundhog Lake. So yeah, just kind of grew up always in the bush and the land and being connected to nature. Okay, so we're specifically talking about glyphosate and forestry and, you know, everything else related. This is the third podcast that we've done on this. The first one was with Maureen and then actually Joel's done two. Joel from Timmins area as well, Jill Terrio. And you know, it's through Joel that we hooked up with you to get your point of view. And

[01:02:17:23 - 01:07:30:02]
you know, I think last week when I first talked to you, one of the things you mentioned was the berries, the blueberries. And looking at it, I've done a little bit of research on it from from what you've mentioned. And when they do spray those areas that have blueberries, when they grow back, what's happening to them? Or, you know, is there a pro and con to eating blueberries from those areas? Yeah, definitely. Like, well, and the big thing about that is when there is notice in the bush, it's usually just a little bit of a sign. I don't know if you've talked about it in your other podcasts, but they're pretty flimsy signs that the forest companies put up to an area that's been sprayed. You know, when you've been in the bush for a while, you start hearing accounts like some people actually will move those signs, you know, to keep hunters out from their area. Like for us, you know, we try not to hunt the blocks, for example, that have been sprayed because our moose, our animals we're harvesting will be eating that foliage, contaminates the meat. So, you know, just an example, I've seen hunters move some of those signs into cut blocks that technically haven't been sprayed yet just to keep other people out. So that's just a big issue too, a public notice. As far as the berries go, you know, there's accounts and I've seen it firsthand that a patch of bush that has been sprayed, the blueberries don't actually come back for a couple of years. And then I think the big issue is that the soil contamination stays there for a long time. So the plants themselves will come back, but they don't seem to have fruit sometimes for, you know, several years. So I guess some concerns I see and I think about too is, you know, I'll be driving down the road, for example, and humans, you know, they try to pick the berries where the easy spots are. So they'll be on power lines, for example, along Highway 101. And, you know, those are sprayed and maintained by, you know, companies to keep the vegetation down. So they're picking berries, you know, from areas that have been contaminated and they might not even know it. And then you see a lot of people selling wild blueberries and stands. And as a consumer, you don't know where they've actually picked those berries or, you know, they've been from an area that hasn't been sprayed. So you really got to do a lot of homework to look into the forest management license to see which spray plans are active and where the blocks are being sprayed. So with the spray, then for sure it seems to be affecting your traditional gathering grounds. Yeah. Okay. I know, you know, in Sudbury, I'm in Sudbury and I don't know where they spray, but I do see the vendors selling their blueberries on the side of the highway. And I've never thought about the potential of the spray affecting the blueberries. Sometimes I do go north, maybe an hour. I don't know where they spray up there, but that's where I've seen the signs. And yeah, it kind of makes sense. But from the research that I've done, the glycophate, it tends to, they say it binds tightly to the soil. And then, you know, getting into the waterways, if that soil does move, of course, it's going to go into the water. Is the water changing at all? Any indication of that? Well, I'm not on the scientific side of it. I could just tell you what I see and what I know. Right? Like I've noticed in our area, for example, like there's been algae blooms that have been coming up that hasn't happened ever that I've seen. So that could be maybe potential of there's some sort of change happening within the water. Right? So I don't know if there's connections there. Everything just seems on a decline in general. Most populations have been on a downward climb. Same with fishing. Fishing hasn't been quite what it used to be, at least when I grew up. Is that because of forestry and glyphosate? I can't specifically tell you. I know black bears are another animal. Like I see my first black bear this summer, just two days ago. And yeah, we used to see them all the time, everywhere in the bush. And you haven't really been seeing them for, it seems like the last six, seven years. They've really, really been on the and another big thing too is it's taking a lot more time to harvest. Because I know, you know, about glyphosate and where they're spraying blocks and what to look for. I have to harvest in areas that, you know, the berries don't grow as well anymore. Right? They're harder to find. The patches are more sparse because they're getting shaded out, etc. Where, you know, back in the day when you knew a block was just manually cut and tended, berries would be everywhere. You'd be able to just basically fill your buckets, you know, two hours you'd get big ice cream buckets full. Now it takes probably three to four hours, right? So even the work to do our harvesting is a lot more strenuous. Now you're going deeper into the bush to find spots that haven't been sprayed. Okay.

[01:07:31:21 - 01:07:37:00]
Back to the moose, moose and deer. So you've noticed any changes in that?

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Yeah, well, yeah, definitely. So like, an example, I harvested a moose last year and the liver had spots on it. And so, you know, traditionally we would be eating all the organs, the heart, the livers, right? I know a lot of our hunters now aren't doing that. I had a buddy who had got a moose on a hydro line. And same thing, the heart had little like maggots in it and all these little ticks that he'd never seen. And we send them to the MNR and they say, Oh yeah, just cook it. It's nothing to worry about. There's no harm to you, right? But I mean, if you've been harvesting moose your whole life and you notice a heart or a liver with spots, you know, now it's not to eat it. Yeah. So that's definitely, there's something changing there.

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know, from the forestry point of view, I know that previous guest Joel was saying that it would be more beneficial to have the locals come in and manage the forest right after they've actually cut or a few years later, instead of spraying. Does that make sense? Does that make sense to you? And does it make economic sense?

[01:08:53:20 - 01:11:08:00]
Well, yeah, I do have a background in forestry as well. I haven't mentioned it, but I did go to school as a forest technician. So I do have some education in the field and ideally you could manually tend all your bushes and you know, there's other forms you can do it. You can use animals, goats, for example, to harvest or help harvest the foliage. And economically, you can be creating more jobs by having more employees basically in the bush, running power saws, doing it the old fashioned way, as opposed to using a helicopter that just comes in and sprays the complete forest, right? And it's saving a couple bucks. Joel had probably mentioned they banned forest applications of glyphosate in Quebec over 20 years. The industry is still operating quite well from Timmins itself. It's, you know, over to the Quebec border is a hundred kilometers away. So, I mean, there's mills that are still open operating. A lot of it comes down, I think, to just shareholders trying to make a couple extra bucks. And the biodiversity that we're losing to, it's like we're getting away from managing the forest for the animals and we're managing the bush for the mills and for the economy. It's not for the benefit of the, you know, the general public to enjoy the nature of the animals. It's for economic benefits to the mills to make dollars and to keep shareholders happy, in my opinion. You'll walk through these blocks. They're basically, you know, what we call monocrops. It's just one species of pine that the mill's after. And when you walk through those bushes, there's silent forests, you know, that you don't hear birds chirping. There's no biodiversity in there. It's pretty eerie to walk through. And it's affecting our harvest. For example, a couple of years ago, I had shot a moose and I was tracking it and it was in a regular stand and then it moved into a monocrop and I was following its blood trail. And as soon as it got into that monocrop, there was no leaves, no foliage, no nothing. It was harder and harder to find the blood trail and I couldn't track it anymore and I lost that animal.

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what is a monocrop? Like, you know, everyone knows what a forest is, but I know you've mentioned what's a monocrop. It's just one species. So basically, you know, in the boreal, we have a bunch of different species, deciduous trees. You'll have poplar, birch, jack pine, black spruce, white pine. Monocrop would just be one species, say, just black spruce, where that's all that's in there, or a jack pine. And there's no other species growing in there. And that's the idea when they do the spray. Normally, what they call a seed bank in your soil, there's all types of seeds in there. So after they would cut or a fire, your poplar your spruce, your jack pines, and then you get a mixed forest. Well, they spray the glyphosate, it kills all the deciduous trees, allows for all the jack pines to grow up. And then there's, to a certain point, they get to what they call free to grow height, and then they out compete everything else. So then you'll get a full stand of jack pine with kind of nothing growing underneath. Very minimal biodiversity in it. So moose are losing feed, animals are losing biodiversity, insects, plants, you know, it's a bigger picture of what's being lost, I guess, for the ecological benefit of all creatures and animals and biodiversity to the bush itself.

[01:12:33:03 - 01:14:06:05]
A big thing too, it seems to like with Joel and myself and Maureen with our Stop line, a lot of it comes down to the general public just not being aware of it. Yeah. And you tell anybody about this information, it's kind of a no-brainer for them. They don't want their water poison. They don't want chemicals sprayed in their forest. We're banned of using these chemicals in our front lawn. So why would we leave it into our forest, where we go and harvest animals, food, catch our fish, etc. So, you know, our Facebook page, remember when we first started, you know, we had 500 followers and we thought that was awesome. We're almost close to 30,000 followers. We're erecting signs all over kind of Northern Ontario. The campaign keeps growing, but I think a lot of it is just, you know, with your help with these podcasts, there's a shift in general public and the M&Rs is slowly following suit to kind of, you know, come to the sense of the band. Last summer we did some protests. We actually blocked Highway 11 down in Serpent River with the tech elders and stopped the spray and they canceled the spray seasons for the Spanish forests and the Pine Land forests. There was no protest this year, no kind of public, you know, rally and the spray was back on. It was back on. Yeah, I know, from what I see, it's just all, it all comes down to dollars. Yeah. And yeah, because you get the

[01:14:06:05 - 01:16:31:02]
trees with the leaves, birch, pine, not pine, but birch, oak, hemlock, poplar, whatever, those have the leaves and they do tend to grow faster. I know I've been trying to grow four seeders in my yard and but they've got shade from all these other trees that I don't want to cut them down, but I tried to water them, they've got to fertilize them or something. Maybe they just need more sun and I have to make room for them. But they are slow to grow. Yeah, another big thing too is our general public doesn't realize that there's processes for them to have a say in how the forest is managed. So with the forest management plans, they do 10 year management plans. So basically the whole province is divvied up in a different forest. So around the Timmins area, there's the Romeo Millet, there's the Pine Land, there's the Gordon Cousins. So all these plans for this forest management are actually coming up in the next couple of years and you can call them and you can ask to see these plans, you can give your input as a citizen to say, you know, we don't want to see herbicides being sprayed, we want to move away from clear cutting and more selective cutting because it's all public for us and as you know, an Ontario citizen, you have a say in what happens in that bush. So again, I think it comes down to general public knowledge and our interest of trying to get involved and wanting to see changes. I think it'd be really interesting to see or to talk to somebody in the Quebec forestry industry or someone who's on that side of things to see how's it been working. Yeah. Because that might be a good indication. But it all comes down to policies. So until the policies are changed, you got to keep up the good fight. Yeah. And there's a good group here around the Timmins-Chapelau area called the Waukatoa Development Group and that's led by David Flood and they're doing a lot of innovative forestry work. They're using Guardian programs to kind of help do manual tending. They're getting involved in their forest management plans and that's a company owned by Chapelau Cree First Nation, Brunswick House First Nation and Sinabic Cree First Nation. So there are some good advancements happening, but you know, it's just a lot of work to do. Yeah, it's taking time. Troy, I want to thank you for coming on and you know, helping us out here and we'll get the word out.

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Miigwetch, thanks for having me and

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